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Iron-on electronic patches enable easy integration of circuits into fabrics

Iron-on patches can repair clothing or add personal flair to backpacks and hats. And now they could power wearable tech, too. Researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have combined liquid metal and a heat-activated adhesive to create an electrically conductive patch that bonds to fabric when heated with a hot iron. In demonstrations, circuits ironed onto a square of fabric lit up LEDs and attached an iron-on microphone to a button-up shirt.

“E-textiles and wearable electronics can enable diverse applications from health care and environmental monitoring to robotics and human-machine interfaces. Our work advances this exciting area by creating iron-on soft electronics that can be rapidly and robustly integrated into a wide range of fabrics,” says Michael D. Bartlett, a researcher at Virginia Tech and corresponding author on the study.

Reservoir thermal energy storage offers efficient cooling for data centers

The rise of artificial intelligence, cloud platforms, and data processing is driving a steady increase in global data center electricity consumption. While running computer servers accounts for the largest share of data center energy use, cooling systems come in second—but a new study by researchers at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), formerly known as NREL, offers a potential solution to reduce peak energy consumption.

Published in Applied Energy, a techno-economic analysis led by Hyunjun Oh, David Sickinger, and Diana Acero-Allard—researchers in NLR’s energy storage and computational science groups—has demonstrated a system to cool data centers more efficiently and cost-effectively.

The approach, called reservoir thermal energy storage (RTES), stores cold energy underground then uses it to cool facilities during peak-demand periods.

New haptic display technology creates 3D graphics you can see and feel

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have invented a display technology for on-screen graphics that are both visible and haptic, meaning that they can be felt via touch.

The screens are patterned with tiny pixels that expand outward, yielding bumps when illuminated, enabling the display of dynamic graphical animations that can be seen with the eyes and felt with the hand. This technology could one day enable high-definition visual-haptic touch screens for automobiles, mobile computing or intelligent architectural walls.

Max Linnander, a Ph.D. candidate in the RE Touch Lab of mechanical engineering professor Yon Visell, led the research, which appears in the journal Science Robotics.

What Time Is It on Mars? Physicists Finally Have an Exact Answer

Summary: Time doesn’t flow uniformly across the solar system, and new research reveals just how differently it unfolds on Mars compared with Earth. By tracing subtle gravitational and orbital influences, scientists have uncovered variations in the pace of Martian time that could become crucial for future navigation and communication far from home.

NIST physicists have precisely calculated how Martian time subtly speeds up and slows down, revealing a daily drift that changes with the planet’s shifting orbit.

Ask someone on Earth for the time and you will get an exact answer, largely because our planet relies on a sophisticated network of atomic clocks, GPS satellites, and rapid communication systems.

Quantum Computer Recycles Its Atomic Qubits

Trapped neutral atoms are an attractive platform for quantum computing, as large arrays of atomic qubits can be arranged and manipulated to perform gate operations. However, the loss of useable atoms—either from escape or from disturbance—can be a limitation for long computations with repeated measurements. Researchers at Atom Computing, a company in California, have devised a “reset or reload” protocol that mitigates atom losses [1]. The method was successfully employed during a computation consisting of 41 cycles of qubit measurements.

All current quantum computers require error correction, which involves measuring certain qubits at intermediate steps of a computation. Reusing these qubits would avoid needing a prohibitively high overhead in qubit numbers, says team member Matthew Norcia. But in the case of atoms, the process of resetting measured qubits risks disturbing unmeasured ones.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers have developed a way to shield unmeasured atoms from the resetting process. They use targeted laser beams to immunize the unmeasured atoms against excitation by shifting their resonances. They then turn on a second set of lasers that cool the measured atoms and reinitialize them, enabling them to join the unmeasured atoms in the next computational step.

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